Escape (52 page)

About the time Niki Nickles was testifying inside the Criminal Courts building at 100 Centre Street in Manhattan, Marlene arrived several blocks south with her father and the twins at the corner of Broad and Wall streets. A railing and half a dozen security guards stood between them and the entrance to the New York Stock Exchange. She approached one of the guards and gave their names. "We're supposed to meet Eric Eliaso. He's with Gotham City Bank."

The guard checked for their names on the clipboard, then used a cell phone to call Gotham City Bank's desk inside the building. "Yes, I have a Marlene Ciampi, Mariano Ciampi, and Isaac and Giancarlo Karp here for Mr. Eliaso. Thank you." He turned to Marlene. "He'll be right out.... As a reminder, cell phones are to be turned off and remain off in the building. No knives, pepper spray, or weapons of any kind are allowed, and you are to remain with your sponsor at all times."

As they waited for Marlene's cousin, Enrique "Eric" Eliaso, she noted the changes that had occurred since the last time she'd visited, which was well before 9/11. It started with the front of the neo-classical building. A huge American flag hung across the six massive Corinthian columns, a symbol of pride and resilience following the destruction of the World Trade Center. On the day of the attack, the building and those around it had been covered with a thick layer of gray ash. The flag said, "You
took your best shot and we're still here."
Yet there was no getting past the fact that the attack had changed the NYSE, like it had so many other "sensitive" institutions.

Prior to 9/11, the line of tourists would have stretched around the building as they waited to enter one of the most famous icons of American financial might. But the general public was no longer allowed inside to stand in the visitor's gallery above the trading floor. Now the only visitors were those with official business in the building, such as the representatives of traded companies, banks, or trading firms, or those sponsored by someone who worked there—all of whom had to pass security clearances.

Now tourists had to be content to snap their photographs from across Broad Street, which had been closed on that block to all traffic. Large cement flower planters and newly planted trees barricaded access to vehicles. Men in dark blue windbreakers with big yellow letters on the back spelling out "CANINE TEAM" cruised through the crowd outside the perimeter with their canine friends.

Bomb dogs,
Marlene thought,
like the mastiff and Presa Canario pups we train at
my
farm
on
Long Island. Wonder if any of my former 'students' are working here?

"Marlene! What's a hot babe like you doin' in a dump like this?" She turned at the sound of her name and smiled as her cousin Eric walked up to the security rail. He'd been quite the athlete "back in the day," a suave Italian quarterback with a full head of wavy black hair and the requisite good looks. He still had the smile that had charmed many a girl in their old Queens neighborhood, but there was scalp showing beneath the oiled-black hair and the six-pack belly had succumbed to pasta and red wine.

Eric never lost his thick-as-a-brick Queens accent created by waves of immigrants, each of which added its layer to the multilingual sandwich. Nor had he graduated high school, receiving his GED instead during a stint at the not-so-well-regarded Flushing Juvenile Detention Center, though he'd since made good at the Exchange and was now a floor manager, overseeing other traders for his bank.

The two cousins embraced, then Eric turned to Mariano. "Mr. Ciampi, how very good it is to see you."

"Enrique," Mariano replied coolly. He'd never forgiven his first cousin's son for a joyriding escapade with his daughter, Marlene, in high school that ended up with both of them in the pokey. "The wonder of that boy is that he's working for a bank," he'd said on the taxi ride over. "Instead of robbing them."

Eric didn't take the brush-off too hard. He figured the old man was probably right about him. He turned his attention to the twins. "Hey, look at you two wiseguys. Man, you're already almost as tall as me. You gonna play hoops like your old man?"

The twins beamed. Although they only saw him a few times a year, they liked "Cousin Eric." He could be counted on to keep up a constant monologue on women, parties, sports, and the joys of being a man. On occasion, out of their mother's hearing, he'd talk about mob hits and gang fights "like they was in the old day ... none of this shooting each other shit....Doesn't take a man to do that....It was all about your fists, maybe a roll of quarters or the occasional knife. Guns are for removing problems, not earning respect." Eric looked around. "Speaking of His Majesty the DA, where's Butch?"

"Couldn't be here," Marlene said. "He's in trial today."

"Oh right, the nutcase who drowned her kids. Ask me, and I don't go for these baloney excuses. So what if I think Jesus wants me to off my neighbor? Wouldn't that be a nice thing. 'Hey, scumbag, I got a hangover and Jesus don't like the way you're mowing your lawn too early on a Saturday morning. KABLOOIE, you're dead!' Hope she fries. I'd have done it myself if she killed one of mine."

"You don't have any kids, Enrique."

"That you know of," he said with a wink.

As they were walking up to the entrance, Eric stopped outside the building. "Okay, first off this area is the heart of the Financial District and is rich in history." He pointed to an old building diagonally across from the NYSE. "That there is the old Federal Building where in 1789, George Washington was sworn in as the first president of the United States. Those were the days when many thought that New York would be the nation's political home, instead of just its financial capital."

On the back side of the NYSE, he said, facing Broadway, was Trinity Church. Built in 1843, it was actually the third version. "The first having burned down in the Great New York Fire of 1776 after the British routed American troops from the southern part of the island, and the second succumbing to snowstorms in the 1840s."

The beautiful Episcopalian church, with its three immense bronze doors, Gothic revival flying buttresses, stained-glass windows, and vaulted ceilings, had literally stood in the shadow of the World Trade Center towers. "Yet it remained virtually unscathed as the skyscrapers crumbled. Its pipe organ filled with so much debris from the outside that it had to be replaced, but nothing much else happened to it. After the attack, the gates to the church were sort of an impromptu memorial where visitors left small notes and tokens in memory of the lives that was lost."

And for publicity-seekers like Jessica Campbell to get on a soapbox,
Marlene thought with disgust.

"Okay, guys, take a look at the pediment on the Exchange," Eric said to the twins. "That's the triangular bit below the roof with the people carved in it. The scene is called 'Integrity Protecting the Works of Man.' The big-titted gal in the center is
Integrity
with her pals
Agriculture
and
Mining
to her left, and
Science, Industry,
and
Invention
over on her right. All of them together represent the sources of America's prosperity, and them waves on the sides are meant to show that the Exchange is important from coast to coast." Eric led them to the security entrance where he flashed his security badge, which got them into the barricaded area. As they walked to the entrance of the Exchange, Marlene noted the new security measures outside and inside the building.

"Yeah, and it's too bad," her cousin replied. "We used to get a lot of visitors, which made it more exciting. Man, we'd get some high-class broads running around, wanting you to show them the 'real' Exchange." He sighed theatrically. "But 9/11 screwed that up. And those flower boxes you see all around the front? They ain't your mom's planters. No, sir, that's cement reinforced with heavy-duty steel bars, and the whole structure goes down eight feet below the street level. You couldn't go through one of them with a Sherman tank."

Inside the doors of the Exchange, the little entourage was required to pass through a metal detector and have their belongings X-rayed. They signed into the "guest book," and then stood on little taped marks on the floor to have their photographs taken for visitor cards.

As they gathered their belongings on the other end of the X-ray conveyor belt, Marlene watched as several police officers walked right through the metal detectors without bothering to remove their guns or other equipment.

They, of course, set off the alarms, which were ignored by the bored NYSE security guards.

Eric caught his cousin's look and chuckled. "Funny, ain't it?" he said under his breath as he led them to a door and down two flights of stairs. "All this big show of security, but then those guys just walk in, guns and all."

"So security isn't as tight as it seems?" Marlene noted.

"It depends. If you're some schmoe like me in a suit, you couldn't get past the front there with a bobby pin," he replied. "But there's two ways of getting in here without nobody sayin' nothin'. One is if you're a
dona bella
with a lot of cleavage showing, then them guys working security ain't lookin' at nuttin' but your bazoombas. You could walk in here with a flamethrower, as long as you got tits. The other way you just saw. If you're in an NYPD uniform, you can waltz right in with guns and whatever. And while it might look like there's a lot of cops patrolling around here, what most visitors don't know is that a lot of these guys aren't assigned to the stock exchange, they're just here for the free lunch."

"The free lunch?"

"Yeah, literally. The bigshots that run the Exchange think that having all these cops around makes it look like there's a ton of security; so they let New York's finest know that they're welcome to free lunch in the cafeteria. They don't even have to be from the local precinct. Hell, there's guys coming over on the Staten Island Ferry or taking the subway from Uptown. You'll see when we get to the cafeteria, it can look like the Policeman's Ball in there from 11 to 2 or later sometimes. Guess the criminals in this city take the noon hours off."

Marlene's cousin proved to be a jovial and informative guide, though some of his "insider" knowledge bordered on the pornographic. He started their tour in the farthest reaches of the basement, beginning with a large, otherwise non-descript room for office supplies—boxes and boxes of paper, notepads, pens, and whatever else the stock market required. Her cousin pointed out a couple of nooks and crannies out of the way of someone coming in the room just for supplies.

"Back in the day, guys would come in here to sleep one off after checking in upstairs," Eric said, then added with a wink at Mariano and the boys, "or he might bring a girl in here for a little of the old badda-boom badda-bing. You dig?"

As the "men" in the group laughed, Eric shook his head sadly. "But that was before all the new security. Now they got cameras everywhere," he said, nodding to one watching them from above the door sill.

Marlene pointed to a small grated door in the shadows toward the back of the room. It looked old and rusted. "Where's that go?" she asked.

Eric shrugged. "Not sure. I heard that it's an old coal tunnel for the original building that was here before they tore it down in 1901. In the old days, they used to have kids push wheelbarrows full of coal for the furnaces in the basements of a lot of the old buildings. Lots of Manhattan from Midtown on down is apparently honeycombed with these tunnels—some of which have been walled off, but others still open into the basement. I heard that when they built the Exchange, they kept some of the foundation and these basement rooms because they would have been too tough to remove." Seeing that he had the full attention of the curious twins, Eric raised his eyebrows mysteriously and added, "Legend has it that the tunnel leads across the street to the crypts beneath Trinity Church." He leaned closer and looked around as if for prying eyes and ears, then whispered, "I heard that a few years ago, one of the floor managers came down here with his little doxie. They was lookin' for a little privacy, you know what I mean, and decided to try out the tunnel. Well, that's the last anybody ever heard from them."

"Is that true?" Giancarlo asked.

"No," Marlene replied.

"I don't know," Eric said. "But I hear that if you ask the right people over at Trinity, they'll tell you that about that same time, they heard screaming coming from down below the church. But when they got up the nerve to go look down in them crypts, they didn't find nothin' ... except ..." He paused, then moved swiftly to the little coal-tunnel door and paused as if listening. "Sorry, thought I heard somethin', probably just rats ... mighty big rats though."

"Except what?" Zak demanded. "They didn't find nothin'..."

"They didn't find anything," his twin corrected.

"Screw you," Zak said, flipping off his brother before their mother could slap his hand. "So what did they not find? I mean, 'except' what? Dammit, Giancarlo, now you got me all confused!"

"That doesn't take much."

Eric looked through the grate of the door into the dark tunnel beyond. "They didn't find
anything,
except a sticky note left on one of the crypts."

"What'd it say?" asked Zak.

"It said 'Beware of the Coal Tunnel Ghost!"'

"Cool," the twins exclaimed. "Can we go in?"

"Not on your life," Marlene laughed. "Eric, you always did know how to spin a yam."

They next arrived outside a glassed-in room that held row after row of tall black boxes with lines of blinking lights and digital readouts. A single table with a computer monitor and keyboard faced them.

"This is the brains of the stock exchange ... at least when I'm not around. Ha ha," Eric joked. "This is the mainframe computer where every single transaction—no matter how big or small—is instantly recorded. And not just for the New York Stock Exchange. It keeps track of other exchanges all over the world. If somebody buys or sells a stock in Tokyo or Sydney, this baby knows as fast as they do it. And I mean that's millions and millions of little pieces of information every day."